Is pointing out Republican rich-guy class warefare against the poor class warfare?

Everyone should read their Orwell.

Whenever I hear right-wing claims of racism, it’s usually an attempt to stop racism. The right is great at co-opting terms that have meaning in one context and using them to accomplish the complete opposite. So, yes – their real class warfare is justified by pulling out the “class warfare” card when people try to stop their actions.

Claims of “class warfare” are just another attempt to rally the poor and working class to the same party who wants to suck them dry.
Or, what @tom_g said.

For the sake of honesty, there’s no new tax revenue and massive spending cuts, and entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid will have to change in order to get our budget in order.

We’re already suffering, we in the middle-lower class. At least we’ll have a hope for a better future if we just buckle down and get it done finally.

The Wall Street Journal takes a slightly more favorable view of Ryan’s plan. And, on terms of fairness, the Democrats and White House have not submitted their plans as of yet.

“The GOP budget doesn’t propose any new tax increases, but neither does it call for repealing the January fiscal-cliff deal that raised tax rates on upper-income households and is projected to bring in more than $600 billion in revenue over 10 years. Mr. Ryan broke with many in his party when he supported that plan.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323826704578355382184797540.html

This reminds me of my neighbor. Every time we bump into each other he bitches and moans to me about how it is the system and certain groups of people that are keeping him from excelling. It’s never him. It’s always everyone and everything. I politely tell him to go fuck himself and point out that it’s not the system or groups of people that are at fault, it is his own choices, actions, and innate abilities that keep him from excelling.

Imagine this divide on a grand scale. Good luck solving that one.

The so-called dichotomy is just another attempt o deflect the general public from the truth. If there weren’t so many deductions on the taxes, there would be no need at all for any new taxes.

People in the U. S. should also be made aware that the majority of Americans are in the top 1% of the world wealth, yet they feel no obligation to share with other, less fortunate nations. Why do they think the top 1% in this smaller economy should bear any burden they aren’t willing to bear in the large picture?

From Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken:

“In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her dead husband and then killed her.

That is class warfare.

Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top one percent is not.”

@SavoirFaire Gods, I love “A Distant Mirror.”

In my opinion, they are every one of them wrong. They all operate under the assumption that their position in government makes them unique and special among mankind. That they are endowed with a particular wisdom, merely on the basis of a tally of votes cast by poeple from a huge spectrum of emotions, intelligence and context, which entitles them to engineer our lives.

The truth is, all they are good at is whoring for votes. Many of them, including the President and many others, have never really worked at or created anything. All they know is a poll and a ballot.

And all of us, in one way or another, to a greater or lesser degree, begin to imagine that our hopes lie with those ambitious, greedy, conceited hypocrites.

Shame on them for sure, and also shame on all of us.

@tom_g & @bookish1 So true.

@KNOWITALL Actually, we are the wealthiest nation on Earth yet have one of the developed world’s stingiest social welfare systems. We could very easily afford to fund our current system. We have chosen not to as a matter of policy so tax breaks and loopholes could be heaped on for the rich and the big, multinational corporations, who pay politicians to provide such favors for them.

Funny, when I was a little kid it was those fortunate enough to be born into vast generational wealth that were thought of as having entitlements. The Rockefeller, the Mellons, etc. How did it get to be that the poor are such lucky-duckies that they need to bear the burden of balancing the entire US budget so the Rockefellers of the world can have even more?

@tomathon I don’t know your neighbor, or what he blames and what life choices he has made. But it’s certainly not true that systems have nothing to do with how well a person can do. If you were unfortunate enough to suddenly find yourself in North Korea, I suspect you would learn the harsh reality of how much a system can hamper your success.

@SavoirFaire & @Seek_Kolinahr Excellent comment.

@josie I don’t read much hope in that. There are a limited set of choices. We could go with no government and anarchy like the failed states of the world. That doesn’t strike me as peaches and cream. There’s monarchy. But we fought a long, hard war to rid ourselves of that. We could, I suppose, rule that only lay persons with no experience at government could govern, and that as soon as they got a clue what they were doing, they had to step down. What’s your preferred direction to the way things are today?

Fact is, this is the only budget submitted thus far and everyone is bashing Obama and Liberals for griping about Ryan’s plan when they haven’t got one submitted at all. So I’ll bow out of this conversation until there’s something to argue about really.

@ETpro
Not saying we are going to go without it. I am just saying that everything they say should be greeted with skepticism. Republican bashing, Democrat bashing, whatever.
They are not as interested in you, your heritage, or your future as they are in the next election and your contributions. The problem, at least in the US, is the number of people who imagine that the government is their father. Like the “pony tail guy” that told Bill Clinton “we are your children”. People believe that, so they grant the government power over their lives. I say that is a mistake.

@KNOWITALL I would direct you to this. The President has submitted a budget each year as required. Each year, Republicans have used procedural tricks in the Senate or, since the 2010 midterm election, their control of the House, to reject it. He’s been waiting on this year’s version for some plan to emerge which might actually let the process go forward. I don’t think Republicans have any intention of allowing that to happen. They are convinced that deliberately broken government suits them better, and that the voters will believe their lies. Your answer indicates they may be right.

@josie Governments have power over people’s lives, like it or not. A stint as an average citizen in North Korea, or a peasant under a feudal lord would tell you that. Preaching false equivalency isn’t likely to bring us closer to finding the sweet spot in governance.

@ETpro I don’t watch Fox News, I was watching CNN actually.

Anyway, I know we are on opposite sides in our views, so we can agree to disagree. Time will eventually show us who can perform for this country. Peace.

@KNOWITALL CNN and all the major news organizations in the US are owned by a handfull of huge, multinational corporations. The news today is “All the news…” our corporate masters deem it…“fit to print.” The myth of the libural media is as big a lie as any propaganda Fox has pushed at its worst. Indeed, time will tell which side prevails. Which socioeconomic strata wins when a particular side prevails is already a forgone conclusion.

@ETpro There are at least 20 different corporate owners of the news outlets in the U. S. and I can’t believe they all have they same bias, or agree on every issue. It could actually be true that some of them have the best interest of the citizens as their goals.

@YARNLADY Quite a contrast from the days when every major city had a big newspaper of two each owned by a separate company, and most small towns had the same. There were tens of thousands of news organizations.

So now there are 20. And they all share one bias. All that is better for corporations is better for them. If any CEO of a major corporation abandons that ethic, s/he is immediately replaced by the board and investors.

@ETpro I think @KNOWITALL‘s position is based on the fact that President Obama’s 2014 budget proposal is already past due and not expected to be released until April. The Republicans have been hitting the president with that one a lot lately.

@YARNLADY There may be 20 corporate owners, but that number obscures important facts about interlocking directorates and how the US is very bad at enforcing rules about cooperation among supposed competitors.

@SavoirFaire Yes, that is correct.

Somehow, though, I go to local public meetings, read the local news, stroll the local grocery and mall and it just doesn’t really seem to interfere with our daily lives that much.

@SavoirFaire You are correct, I just don’t like to argue with people about facts, it wastes my time honestly.

@YARNLADY The more you live locally, the less that global empires can affect you. But the global empires might be affecting you in ways that are hard to spot, or that are impossible to spot because what they’ve created are absences. It is impossible for me to know, for instance, which newspapers might exist if there weren’t a cabal of media corporations making sure they cannot enter the market. If you don’t go looking for the information they’re trying to keep from you, it’s easy to think it doesn’t exist.

@KNOWITALL That seems like a strategy that is both arrogant and counterproductive, especially on a site like Fluther that has many intelligent members who are open to new ideas and evidence. If you aren’t willing to present facts to someone who disagrees with you, then you don’t have an argument. Arguments, after all, are made out of facts strung together with reasoning. If you won’t give people facts, you are in essence saying that you should be allowed to impose your opinion without backing it up in the slightest. But that is to forgo the tenets of rational discussion.

@SavoirFaire I understood @KNOWITALL‘s response but wanted to share the reasons why that was the case. When facts don’t matter, doing so is if little use.

@ETpro Fair point.

I find it to be so paradoxical that the sect of politicians whom claim to dislike governmet spend much more money trying to be a part of it than their ‘big government’ counterparts. There’s a reason for this, and it’s because most self-proclaimed conservatives are really communitarians at heart, not true objectivists. We’ll likely never see a true objectivist in any major position of politics in the western world, or any part of the world for that matter.

@SavoirFaire Pardon my skepticism. My stating a plain fact above was disregarded because it wasn’t in Obama’s favor, in my opinion, which is sad and counter-productive. It was just as easy for any of you to Google as it was for me, and by posing the question, I’m fairly sure ETPro is smart enough to have known that it was a simple fact.

@ETPro You said it, “When facts don’t matter, doing so is of little use”, which is my point exactly.

@KNOWITALL That’s not skepticism. It is perhaps cynicism and definitely pessimism, but not skepticism. In any case, while I agree that it is (also) counterproductive to ignore facts when they are presented, that doesn’t make it any less counterproductive to have a policy of not presenting them. This a discussion site, and discussions follow certain rules—such as presenting evidence for the assertions one makes.

It seems to me, however, that @ETpro did not disregard your comment (and you certainly cannot accuse me of having done so, since I backed you up). What happened is that @ETpro tried to give a context for your complaint that perhaps made it more understandable. That doesn’t mean you should be satisfied. You might still take issue with the claim that “the President has submitted a budget each year as required,” given that he has not done so yet and was required to do so by February 4th. But that’s a much different reaction from refusing to engage when disagreement arises.

@SavoirFaire I was saying that I am skeptical that you are correct in your assumptions about ETPro and what he meant, and that’s exactly what I meant. While I appreciate your patience in posting your factual proof of my statement, it was not necessary to me or to prove my point for me to someone who doesn’t seem to care about facts.

Liberals who refuse to acknowledge Obama is fallible are a waste of time.

I presented a fact, he proceeded to tell my about Reublican’s tricks and lies, so I moved on. Why try to have a mature discussion with people who are so one-sided in their thinking that they can’t acknowledge a simple fact?! It would be like a Republican saying Bush never misspoke during his entire term- lol

Here is ETPro’s response (as written above) to my simple statement about Obama not having submitted a budget while everyone criticized Ryan’s budget last week:

“I would direct you to this. The President has submitted a budget each year as required. Each year, Republicans have used procedural tricks in the Senate or, since the 2010 midterm election, their control of the House, to reject it. He’s been waiting on this year’s version for some plan to emerge which might actually let the process go forward. I don’t think Republicans have any intention of allowing that to happen. They are convinced that deliberately broken government suits them better, and that the voters will believe their lies. Your answer indicates they may be right.”

@KNOWITALL I stand by all that I said. I did not disagree with your statement that Obama has not submitted a budget yet for this year. I backed it up, but with an explanation of why. What I said was also fact, and I believe more than enough to mitigate your charge. It is you that is staking out sacred turf and refusing to acknowledge anything that conflicts with your ideological stand, not me. I have on no Obama blinders, and there is plenty I take him to task on.

@ETpro Which is why we can agree to disagree, as I said above. I stick with my posts as well.

Granted, my patience for arguing inanities is very low, but in this case, there is no ‘sacred turf’ and no ‘idealogical stand’ that precludes me understanding whether Obama submitted a budget or not.

@KNOWITALL That was never the charge. I was pointing out that you were ignoring WHY he’s been tardy submitting a budget this year. After a certain number of times reaching out to shake someone’s hand, and getting hit in the face with a shovel by them; one might reasonably raise their hand in a defensive mode. Not everybody is Charlie Brown trusting that this time Nancy really won’t pull that darned football away at the last moment.

@ETpro Ah, I see, but I doubt if excuses would prevent liberals from bashing a Republican that missed a deadline, we’d be hearing about that for years- lol. Peace, I’m out.

@KNOWITALL You’re absolutely right it’s not a one-way street. I got an email today asking me to sign a petition condemning John Boehner for the horribly sexist crime of mentioning Golden Girls. I deleted it.

Bad choice of words on Boehner’s part? Yeah. But I am not jumping on that band wagon. He did finally let the Violence Against Women act come to the floor and pass.

@ETpro I truly feel that whatever political box we fill in at the polls should be countered by listening to every viewpoint on a subject available, so we can find the right end game that benefits all of us. :) A lot of Reps still think Boehners an arse if that helps…lol